I'll Always Hold Him in My Heart
by DreamsOfScience
Summary: As she relaxes in the wind, as her eyes daze away, she catches a glimpse, a flash of the one she loves, smiling at her. - Hitomi has returned to Earth, but is left yearning for something she can never regain. Her therapist certainly doesn't seem to understand her.
1. Chapter 1

**Psychological Evaluation**

Kamakura-Kita Psychiatric Hospital

* * *

 **Kanzaki Hitomi**

Date of Evaluation: 9/24/96

Case No.: 69,115,99

Building No.: 7

Date of Report: 9/25/96

* * *

 **PURPOSE FOR EVALUATION:** The patient is a 15-year-old, single, female Japanese high-school student. The evaluation was made due to alterations in her behavior after a temporoparietal stroke, as noted by her friends and family. Her BMI of 17.2 indicates a possible case of anorexia nervosa, and her parents fear that she is experiencing depression with possible psychotic delusions.

 **ASSESSMENT PROCEDURES:**  
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-A)  
Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale (SRRS)  
Mental Status Examination  
Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale (SHSS)  
Fantasy-prone Personality Scale (Wilson & Barber)  
Review of Prior Psychological Assessment  
Review of Prior Medical Records  
Clinical Interview

The patient participated in 4 hours of testing and a 1 hour diagnostic interview. Tests were administrated by the presiding psychiatrist.

 **BACKGROUND INFORMATION:** The patient has no prior history of depression or other major psychological disorders. Her family indicated that the first signs of depression came after the death of her grandmother, who was very close to her. After experiencing a temporoparietal stroke and being hospitalized for four days, she apparently became very quiet and often seemed "lost in her own world."

Family reports indicate that around this time, she abandoned two of her valued hobbies, Tarot fortune-telling and sprinting. She would occasionally talk of dreaming of another world she calls 'Gaea,' perhaps a form of paracosmic fantasy.

 **MENTAL STATUS EXAMINATION:** The patient appeared quiet and introverted, preferring to contemplate or fantasize rather than responding to my inquiries. Nonetheless, she was casually dressed and seemed to be oriented in reality. The patient avoided eye contact, but there was no abnormality of gait or deportment. Speech functions were normal. Vocabulary and grammar suggested intellectual functioning at an above average range.

Memory and thought functions appeared to be intact. Thought content revealed no evidence of paranoia or suicidal ideation. However, she gave the impression of a fantasy prone personality, and, after hesitation, admitted to believing in a paracosm called 'Gaea.' Whether this fantasy pre- or postdated the stroke is unclear. No other evidence of mental disorder presented itself **.**

 **RESULTS OF EVALUATION:** See pages 2-4.

 **SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS:** Results of psychological evaluation reveal a fantasy prone personality with some schizotypal beliefs and a deeply developed, internally coherent secondary world. While her personality has become more introverted after the stroke, there is no evidence of depression as such.

As the patient's daydreams do not appear maladaptive, it is recommended that the efforts to establish a trusting relationship be continued in individual therapy sessions. The patient will benefit from gaining a more grounded, realistic perspective on her fantasies.

Please let me know if there are any questions concerning this evaluation.

xxxx xxxxxxx, Ph.D

Psychiatrist


	2. Chapter 2

_"Come now, I shall tell you - and convey home the tale once you have heard it -_  
 _These are the only ways of inquiry that can be conceived:_  
 _The first says 'It exists' and 'It must exist.'_  
 _This is the path of belief, for it follows the Truth._  
 _The second says 'It doesn't exist' and 'It must not exist.'_  
 _This I point out to you is a path wholly unknowable._  
 _For you could not know that which does not exist - because it is impossible -_  
 _Nor could you put it in words..._  
 _For 'to be thought' and 'to exist' are the same thing."_  
\- Parmenides, 'On Nature'

She is alone. He's there somewhere, somewhere in the great world out there, of that she is certain. Why is the ocean so grey out here... As she relaxes in the wind, as her eyes daze away, she catches a glimpse, a flash of the one she loves, smiling at her. And for a second, the sea turns blue.

"Van... I'm doing fine."

Is she lying to herself or to him?

.

.

.

I look at the girl lying before me on the couch, her eyes fixated on the ceiling like someone whose mind is wandering in some other reality, invisible to the people around her. She is young, light-brown hair, very thin and pale, calm, always lost in her thoughts, often fiddling with her pendant.

It's quiet, I can hear the clock ticking on the wall. If she won't break the silence, I will.

"So, Hitomi, is there anything you'd like to talk about today?"

"Nothing you'd understand."

"Does it matter? It might make you feel better just to say it out loud."

She stays quiet for a moment, perhaps struggling with herself.

"I-I've come to the conclusion that Gaea is real after all."

I sigh. We've gone through this before.

"I thought we agreed it was all just a dream. Or a 'vision.'"

"No, it all really happened to me." She bites her lip in agitation. "Van is real."

I must try to be gentle. Even if we have to go through this again.

"Hitomi, you had a stroke in your right temporoparietal junction. You were comatose in the hospital for almost three days."

I pause to emphasize my point.

"Gaea was just a hallucination. Van is a fictional construct created by your subconscious mind." I'll just give her an example.

"Did we not establish that Allen Schezar was a displacement of your crush on your best friend's boyfriend? Mere subconscious wish-fulfillment."

"I'm not denying that. But Van is still real."

I try to be understanding. It's my job, after all.

"If Van is a hallucination, then he cannot be real."

Hitomi's eyes have moved away from the ceiling. She averts them, avoiding me.  
She speaks in a soft voice.

"May I ask you something?"

"Go ahead."

"Is Isaac Newton real?"

Her question worries me. She better not be going delusional.

"Of course."

"Have you ever seen him?"

"Considering that he died almost three hundred years ago, I cannot say I have. Though I've seen pictures of him."

"So how do you know he's real?"

I pause for a moment. What is she getting at?

"I've read it. In the history books."

"Those could be fabricated, couldn't they?"

Conspiratorial delusions. She might be slipping into schizophrenia.

"Maybe. But it sounds pretty improbable, doesn't it?"

"What I'm saying is, if you believe it just because you've read it in books, then from your perspective Isaac Newton isn't that different from Nausicaä."

Miyazaki, eh? I mark that in my notebook. Maybe that is the source of her fantasies.

"Perhaps. But objectively, Newton existed and she didn't."

"I said you wouldn't understand."

That hurts my pride a bit. What does a kid like her know, anyway? We stay quiet for a moment. Then, she seems to think of something.

"Do you believe in telepathy?"

She sounds almost shrewd, like she knows exactly what I'm going to say. Which she does.

"It is physically impossible."

"Have you ever gone to a room, and your friend is feeling sad, and you can immediately feel it without her saying anything? Grandma said that was telepathy."

Not that old granny again.

"Don't confuse what your grandma says with reality."

"Then how do you explain it?"

She still sounds like she's in control of the conversation.

"Subconscious impressions. Your friend is acting different from usual, so your subconscious mind tries to discover the reason behind that by figuring out what she must be feeling. Then it tells your conscious mind that your friend is probably feeling sad. That's all there is to intuition."

Was that the flash of a smile, in the corner of her lips?

"And how does your subconscious know what she's feeling?"

"It's called theory of mind. You have a model of your friend, which you can use to figure out how she thinks, or how she would react in any given situation."

She seems to be thinking deeply of what I said.

"But I can't actually know what is going on in her mind. She might be just acting. Or maybe she is only a puppet, pretending to think and feel, even though she cannot. I would never know."

Puppets pretending to be human? She's clearly taken a turn for the worse.

"If she looks like a human and acts like a human, you should assume she also thinks and feels like a human."

"You said Gaea wasn't real. But it felt real to me."

She pauses, extremely agitated, before continuing.

"If that wasn't real, how can I know this is? Just because it feels real? Just because it's consistent?"

"Hitomi, do not slip into fantasy again. You know this is real because this is real."

"I can't know that. All I know is that it feels real."

I am getting agitated myself, now. I have to come up with something, or she might go psychotic.

"W-when grandma died, we visited her house. And I could still feel her, I could still feel her presence lingering there. She was watching me from the afterlife.  
And she came to me in a dream, to say goodbye."

I'm not a believer myself, but...

"How thoughtful of her."

Her tone turns accusational.

"I know what you're thinking. You don't believe a word of it. It was just 'theory of mind.' My simulation of her, coming to say goodbye."

She's on the verge of tears. This is not going well.

"But don't you see? That means they never leave! We're always carrying them in our hearts..."

"That is a beatiful thought, Hitomi. You're very mature for your age."

Flattery is about the only way I can think of to calm her down right now.  
She sounds like she's trying to say something, but can't get the words out. Her eyelids have turned red. She breathes deeply, and finally, she opens her eyes.

"I spent a long time with Van. It felt like a lifetime. We experienced all those amazing adventures which I'll never forget - together. He wasn't just my sock puppet. It was all real to me."

Suddenly, she seems to run out of energy and falls limp. With what seems to be the last of her strength, she says:

"So you see, Van is fictional. But he's also very real."

Hitomi closes her eyes, and for a moment her surroundings fall away, and she's back there, and the Earth is in the sky, and she is hugging Van, and Van is hugging her, they're locked in an eternal embrace, the silent expression of their boundless love for each other. Slowly, she opens her eyes. Van's eyes.

Because they are one.

"I'm going to be a writer. I'll share their stories with everyone. Merle, Allen, Van, everyone... They'll all live through me. And when I die, I will be with them again, and I'll show them all the stories I made... I'll show them all the people who were helped by those stories! Because as long as there is love, we can always see..."


End file.
